


Met by Moonlight

by Annie D (scaramouche)



Category: Ultraviolet
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-25
Updated: 2006-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:52:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scaramouche/pseuds/Annie%20D
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael meets up with an old friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Met by Moonlight

Human beings, who had an already limited warranty on their bodies, were the only creatures on the planet stupid enough to indulge in activities immediately hazardous to their health. Smoking was a prime example of such an activity, and that was probably why Michael had taken it up.

He’d started some six months after his initiation when he learned that the leeches couldn’t do it. Oh sure, they could inhale and attempt to savour, but the effect was purely cosmetic, just like that of food and drink. Nothing could harm their perfectly preserved bodies (save the exceptions that _could_), so all typically destructive human pleasures were beyond their reach.

Jack had once commented that by taking up smoking Michael was ‘_flaunting his mortality_’, and Michael had agreed whole-heartedly. It was the only thing they could agree on anymore. Leeches looked down on such behaviour as a blatant waste of life, as if they hadn’t pawned off what they had already.

Whatever the deeper motivations, the most immediate reason for his lighting up was that it was bloody cold and the cigarette was the only source of warmth Michael had. He’d arrived at the meeting point earlier than agreed, just to make a precautionary sweep of the place. He didn’t really suspect any foul play, but at least in doing so he’d avoid another one of Vaughan’s safety lectures.

“Aren’t you a little old to be on the kiddie swing?”

When Michael looked up, there she was. She was standing next to the monkey bars as though she’d been the one waiting for him, though that was never the case because if there was one habit that Kirsty had kept, it was her spot-on punctuality.

She looked perfect, as always. In fact, she looked quite like a misplaced photograph, right from the way she folded her hands in a loose finger-knot exactly along the belt line of her jacket, her cheeks untouched by cold and her hair never any longer than that extra inch below the chin. As always.

“You’re never too old to indulge yourself,” he said. He stood up slowly, taking his time to brush playground gravel off his pants. “By the way, Frances is all right, thanks for asking.”

“I had nothing to do with that, I told you,” Kirsty said, hurt bubbling quickly to surface. Even now she hadn’t mastered their famous party trick of keeping emotion tucked away. “And I’m glad, of course.”

“U-huh, yes, and why did you contact me?” Michael was quick to get out of small talk.

Kirsty paused and Michael paused along with her, he being wary of the coiled tension in her shoulders that indicated planned movement. A long time ago this would have been the right moment for Kirsty to touch his shoulder, palm upward and fingers splayed out in that comforting gesture that was all her own. All she had left to soothe was her voice, though it cracked when she told him, “They’re going to shut you down.”

“We know,” Michael said.

“No, you don’t,” Kirsty insisted. “We’ve gotten in deeper than you think. We’ve done so much for you, Michael, but soon even I won’t be able to help you, if you keep refusing to help us.”

That made Michael smile, just slightly.

Kirsty sounded desperate now. “We’re going to _win_, Michael. Do you know what that means?”

“It means your cattle drive will be complete, congratulations.”

“That’s not what we stand for, and you know it,” Kirsty said. “We respect the sanctity of life more than anyone else on this earth. We’ve had to take responsibility for this planet after _you_ failed to.”

“Immortality has nothing to do with respecting life. Know what else is immortal, Kirsty? Know what’s the only other truly immortal living thing in existence? Cancer.”

Kirsty’s mouth pulled tightly over whatever else she wanted to add. Instead, she sighed and then said gently, “I’m not here to argue with you—”

“Fine,” Michael said, dropping the cigarette onto the gravel and crushing it under his shoe. “Send my regards to Jack.”

He’d taken but two steps away when he felt her hand touch his shoulder. In response his own trigger hand jumped up towards his holster, but didn’t reach it in time.

When it was over, Michael was back in the kiddie swing, eyes up to the still darkened sky. There was no nausea, dizziness, or any other telltale sensation of having blacked out. In the forefront of his mind, all he had was the perfect clarity of knowing that all he’d been doing for past hour was sit in that kiddie swing, waiting uselessly for his old friend Kirsty to show up, though she never did.

There was no irritation in that knowledge, and that in itself should have made Michael suspicious. But before he could get there, sudden desperation gripped his skull with ice-cold fingers, dragging him out of the swing and away from the park. He could barely get into his car and start the engine for all of his shaking.

He needed to leave. Not just leave, but _leave_. He needed to run, leave the country, and hide somewhere far away where no one would be able to find him. He needed to be safe.

He did manage to get back to his house, already having mentally planned out which clothes and items to throw in his suitcase, but Vaughan was there on the couch in his living room, waiting for him.

“I need—” Michael started to say, but Vaughan took his arm in that familiar iron grip.

“Angie’s waiting,” was all Vaughan said before Michael blacked out again.

This time, when he woke, he was well aware of being unconscious at all. Then he was aware that he was in the reclining chair in the centre of Angie’s dimmed lab, starring up at the cracked plaster ceiling.

“Good morning,” said Angie, somewhere off to his right.

“Thought you were going to sleep through ‘til lunchtime, to be honest,” said Vaughan, somewhere to his left.

Michael blinked a few times, then turned his head to peer down at his left shoulder. His shirt had been neatly buttoned back up, but he could feel the familiar twinge of skin made sensitive by machinery. “So there was an infection,” he said.

“Yes. She bit you in the shoulder, not at the usual spot above the jugular,” Angie said, moving into his line of sight. She gestured for him to look at the little torch she had lifted up to his face. Angie blurred in and out as the light swept over his eyes.

“Mission accomplished, then,” Vaughan said.

“We won’t know for a while,” Angie said. She put the torch down and moved towards her microscope table, where blood samples – Michael’s and others – in various stages of genetic manipulation stood in neat little test tubes. “The theory of backwards infection has been around for quite some time, but I don’t think they’d ever thought it could ever be achieved.”

“We thought a lot of the leeches’ biological weaponry couldn’t be made either,” Vaughan pointed out. “What’s so outrageous about a cancer for the cancer?”

“Pearse’s legacy,” Angie said, though she didn’t have to. “And if anything does happen, the Code V’s will want to keep it under wraps. For all we know they’ll try to keep her isolated once it takes effect—”

“She’ll find me,” Michael said, looking up to count the cracks in the ceiling. “She knows she can count on me.”


End file.
